Sometimes you want to customise your Python project's build with a pre-processing or post-processing step that isn't built-in to the PEP-517 build backend that you happen to be using. In my day-to-day work I have multiple such needs, including: The ability to run tasks before the actual build takes place …
In part three of my XKCD font saga I generated several hundred glyphs as PPM images, and classified them with their associated character(s). In this instalment, I will convert the raster glyphs into vector form (SVG) and then generate a rudimentary font using FontForge. If you'd like to follow …
In part two of my XKCD font saga I was able to separate strokes from the XKCD handwriting dataset into many smaller images. I also handled the easier cases of merging some of the strokes back together - I particularly focused on "dotty" or "liney" type glyphs, such as i, !, % and …
In part one of XKCD font saga I gave some background on the XKCD handwriting dataset, and took an initial look at image segmentation in order to extract the individual strokes from the scanned image. In this instalment, I will apply the technique from part 1, as well as attempting …
The XKCD font (as used by matplotlib et al.) recently got an update to include lower-case characters. For some time now I have been aware of a handwriting sample produced by Randall Munroe (XKCD's creator) that I was interested in exploring. The ultimate aim is to automatically produce a font-file …
This evening I'm going to take a different approach to how I would normally blog. Rather than reporting the results of a technical investigation or highlighting a new/shiny package, I wanted to paint a realistic picture of the technical exploration process. As it happens, this particular investigation consumed a …
Update, August 2026 I no longer maintain conda execute, and haven't for some time. If you're looking for the same idea today, running a script in a throwaway environment described by inline metadata, the well-supported options are pixi exec (the closest conda-native successor, from the prefix-dev team) and, for pure-Python …
After what feels like years chipping away at the problem, not least from some awesome developers including the whole of the IPython development team, Michael Droetboom and Jason Grout, I recently closed the development loop and added a new matplotlib backend providing interactive figures in the IPython notebook environment. The …
Update, August 2026 Biggus is no longer developed. For lazy, chunked, out-of-core array computation in Python today, use Dask. Biggus was one of several early efforts in this space and had some influence on Dask's design. The rest of this article is preserved unchanged for historical interest. I often deal …
When dealing with colours in scientific visualisations some people like to have a colourmap which can be indexed into to pick specific colours. Whilst this isn't necessarily the best way of handling colours in matplotlib, it certainly adds a degree of familiarity to users who have come over from other …
I recently added a new function to matplotlib to make it easier to draw pseudo-colour plots given specific levels and colours, in exactly the same way as you can with contour and contourf. import numpy as np import matplotlib.pyplot as plt from matplotlib.colors import from_levels_and_colors cmap, norm = from_levels_and_colors …